Deviant lifestyles in fragrant surroundings are always a bit of a shock. One afternoon I knock on the door of a Victorian semi in a desirable street in north London, average house price £700,000, all period features and private schools. A middle-aged sex maniac answers the door; she is the author of graphic, no-holes-barred (sorry) erotic memoirs and she looks frankly disappointing. Not a love bite or a stocking top in sight. Instead a long, flowing skirt, subtle make-up, curly blonde hair strictly tamed, and covered for our pictures with a dark wig. The only giveaway (but not really) is a low-cut top from which breasts – for which she receives the gratitude of many – threaten to spill. Does she have a parking voucher, please?

I wonder if “Dr Donny”, the tall, dark, handsome stranger who arrived on this very doorstep one morning, interrupted the flow of their shared fantasy to satisfy local parking regulations. Probably not. The wardens are hot in these parts, but not as hot as the sex. Their assignation was arranged via a chatroom and telephone call: she opened the door and ran upstairs, while the “doctor”, actually a fund manager with a stethoscope and an unusual bedside manner, followed on. He could have left her robbed and battered – though rape would have been a pretty impossible charge to uphold – but instead he left his calling card and asked to come again. This is the woman men have always believed exists, the saucy nympho who beckons from her door with a smile and a negligee, the one their wives insist is a figment of their fetid imaginations. This woman is a reward for their unfailing hopefulness. She is also their worst nightmare: a merciless judge of male members.

Portnoy has written two books, in the tradition of Anaïs Nin and Catherine Millet, though thankfully she has none of the latter’s literary pretensions. The first book, The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker, was published two years ago to a gratifyingly outraged response (the Daily Mail painted her as tragic, which, for a self-appointed iconoclast, is pretty much the Oscar). It sold 30,000 copies in three languages, very decent figures for her genre. As far as she can tell, her readers are fortysomething women whose partners read the books rather than buy them.

She is in successful company: titles such as Jane Juska’s A Round-Heeled Woman and Abby Lee’s Girl with a One Track Mind have turned erotic memoirs into breakthrough blockbusters. Portnoy’s follow-up, The Not So Invisible Woman, is published this month, not so much a sequel as more of the same. (Her editor at Virgin Books said not to worry; more of the same would be fine.) She also runs a blog, which she launched to market the books, with a podcast dispensing master classes in bedroom events.

She is rather like Delia waxing about the variations on a classic victoria sponge, full of helpful hints on technique and tips for foolproof results. Isn’t she embarrassed? She laughs, putting her head on one side, all cutesy. “Aw, no, I like it too much.” Her books are a rampant picaresque through naturist saunas, swingers’ clubs, fetish joints and online chat rooms where chat is the last thing on the agenda; pornographic and crude, the smells and emissions of copulation are their obsession. If you took away the dirty stuff, no narrative would be left; if you took away the internet, there would be no Portnoy persona at all. Cybersex and its global confluence of niche peccadilloes rescued her life – or ruined it, if you are a moralist – from the sexless invisibility of the middle-aged woman, described and sometimes welcomed by feminist writers such as Germaine Greer, but not by a gal who wants to make trousers strain at the seams.

We have spoken before, Suzanne Portnoy and I. In her straight life, using her real name, she is an entertainment PR with whom I once tried to set up a story. It didn’t work out, but she offered me tickets to a family show she thought my little son might enjoy: friendly, professional, to the point. This is clearly how she runs her sex life. As I walk into her kitchen, she points out the hot tub in her small back garden, first stop for the conquests she brings home (second stop: kitchen table); it is overlooked by an entire block of neighbours, which amuses the new heroine of clit-lit.

Portnoy, 46, is straight-talking, shameless. She laughs all the time, a big, brash, pearly toothed laugh, which is her weapon and her armour; she acts brazen, but actually she is trying to stop you getting to know her. When you have sacrificed your sexual privacy, you guard your domestic trivia, the only secret left, like a rottweiler.

Having read her books, you know more than you could ever want to know about a divorced mother who doesn’t wear knickers: you know what she keeps in her bedside cabinets – and it’s not Vicks Sinex nasal spray like me. Her ideal weekend, when her two sons stay with their father, is as a single woman on the swingers’ scene.

Portnoy was married to a handsome executive in the entertainment industry for a decade. It was a rocky marriage, latterly celibate, which set her on the road to sexual nirvana. “Suzy housewife” was overweight, frustrated, subsumed in home-making and motherhood. The sex, which had never been explosive, became a distant memory. “I suggested to my husband that if he wanted to kick-start our relationship he should buy some porn. He just said, ‘You’re sick.’ My kids were always wrapped around me. I couldn’t bear anyone else to touch me.”

One night when she was drunk and her husband away on business, she meandered online to a contact website, insisting that all she wanted was a male pen pal with whom to discuss her life. Instead she met a New York lawyer with whom she shared a sexual epiphany. She flew to see him for sex, at first lying to her seemingly unconcerned husband, once – and this is where I can’t help disapproving – even taking her young kids to stay in his flat while his own family were away. “We were catalysts for each other’s sort of sexual journey,” she recalls in her twangy hybrid transatlantic accent. “He wanted to explore sexual experiences. And I felt as if I was going back to my twenties and reinventing myself.

It was very exciting and scary. There was a lot of fantasy. I love fantasy.” But with Portnoy it doesn’t remain fantasy for long. The only thing he wanted that she couldn’t provide was to be told how much she hated him. Her fellow travellers, you see, are not just hedonistic pioneers: the damaged are present in numbers. The self-destructive are happy to be selling themselves cheap; the addicts are seeking oblivion. Curiously, however, none of this is the case with Portnoy.

The daughter of conventional and happily married parents in a close-knit Jewish family, she was a bookish girl, growing up in London and America. They gave her little to rebel against, if that’s what we were assuming; a liberalism she has bestowed on her own sons, aged 13 and 16. “My children are so straight that it’s funny. My youngest son said to me once, ‘You tell us we can do anything, we can talk to you about anything, but because you’ve done it all, we don’t want to.’” She warns her older son, but gently. “I say, if you are gonna have sex, please be safe. If you’re gonna take drugs, don’t take a lot of them.”

Is Portnoy safe herself? In seven years of wild sex with strangers she can only recall one incident that looked as if it might turn nasty. Paradoxically for a secret life, she sticks to public places; she is regularly tested for diseases she has never caught; she uses condoms. Even when blindfolded in a sex club, the only thing she demands is that male members be properly dressed.

She lost her virginity at 17, was sexually adventurous at university, was made miserable by unrequited crushes in her twenties. She has more than made up for that in middle age by casting a smaller net and turning an ocean of unavailable men into a pond of appreciative specialists. In the real world she might find it hard to hook a handsome banker; she’s too old, too curvaceous and, as she herself says, “hardly Cindy Crawford”, probably too loud and scary to boot. Being single at swingers’ parties, however, makes her hot property; being adventurous makes her a catch; truly enjoying sex makes it all easy for her.

But not as easy as the internet makes it. With a ready-made infrastructure of infidelity, women can advertise for NSA (no strings attached) encounters. No longer needing to brave bars and clubs to meet men, straight or swinging women access hook-up sites such as meet2cheat.co.uk or illicitencounters.co.uk, along with texts, webcams, hidden e-mail accounts. Portnoy’s favourite, Swinging Heaven, boasts over 800,000 members, mostly men; but look out, boys, she says, the women are coming. Memoirs like hers are the glossy brochures for a libidinous minibreak: the books are leading the curious to experiment, the sex is producing the books, and growing the market. Her editor at Virgin Books, Adam Nevill, talks of a “sexual revolution… not dissimilar to what happened in the Sixties in terms of changing attitudes to sexual lifestyles”.

The writing started while she was living with a boyfriend, Daniel. She sent his unpublished novel and her cheeky blog, detailing her life as a London PR, to a publisher, who asked her to turn it into a book. Tragically, Daniel died of liver cancer. I’ve never read a more perfunctory description of the death of a lover; but then she keeps the stuff that makes her cry to herself – she will open her legs to a roomful of men, but she won’t open her heart. Though she no longer loved him, she tried to score some Viagra so that she could make his last weeks more tolerable. His doctor was appalled, but you can’t help admiring her courage in making the request. By the time she got the prescription, he was too sick for sex.

His death in 2005 was the launch pad for her dive into sexual adventure, as if every day were her last. While he had been dying at home she had found solace by logging onto a swinging site. The day he passed away she went to Rio’s, a unisex naturist club in Kentish Town, where brushing a thigh in the sauna or a fumble in the Jacuzzi (whose waters you’d think twice about sampling) can soon spark a mini-orgy in a specially allocated room. (The place is mentioned so often, its owners should sponsor her website.)

“I thought, I really am going to have a good time now. I’m gonna go for it in a major, major way. And a friend of mine who had suffered the death of both parents in a short period of time told me she’d have shagged a tree on the day her mum died. I felt like that. It’s like sex is an answer to death, grief and everything. You just feel like, ‘Give me something that makes me feel alive.’ ”

In the middle of this maelstrom, she met 50-year-old Greg, her long-time swinging partner and sexual mentor, with whom she now shares a cosy if unusual Memory Lane. A year or so after Daniel’s death, with six boyfriends on the go, she started to write her adventures, unencumbered by modesty, euphemism or guilt.

Is there something wrong with this woman? In the past her friends have worried about her, begged her to get help for sex addiction. And a Freudian analyst could have a field day with her insatiable need to be “filled up”; what is it that makes her feel so empty? Her lifestyle has lost her friends: judgmental women, mainly, those scared she would steal their men, and, I imagine, those who just thought it was all too seedy. In general, women need their friends to affirm their own life choices. Portnoy’s are too outré for comfort, too strident to be challenged, begging too many questions she can’t or won’t address.

We are roughly the same vintage, mothers of boys, writers, I am married, monogamous (sexually comatose compared to Portnoy). We have much and nothing in common. The longer I spend with Madam Sin discussing the etiquette of sauna sex, as sweet children gaze from framed school photographs on the shelf behind the sofa, the more I become aware that my life would horrify her, just as hers terrifies me. Liberation?

I cannot imagine anything worse than texting around London for men willing to stage a gangbang. To be honest, even the idea of maintaining an ever-ready bikini line is too much. Actually, to be really honest, the late nights would make it a deal-breaker. Is she a bad woman as well as a very naughty girl? I don’t think so. There is nothing wilfully cruel, or negligent, in how she treats others, but grading men according to the size of their penises seems a pointless reversal of the old sexism we all marched and shouted about a lifetime ago.

If she is impressed with the equipment, its owner might be admitted into her stable of studs, her rotating “dating portfolios”. Sexy Suze travels like a surveyor with a tape measure. Numbers present more of a problem than size: she can’t tell you how many men there have been because she stopped counting at 100. And for all her claims about being “in control”, isn’t she turning herself into a commodity to be used? Her answer is: as long as she’s enjoying it, so what? The censorious voices of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin might say that her voraciousness is feeding an industry in which women are base material, the pole dancers and strippers, the hostesses and lap-grinders, who are economically if not physically abused. The UK cyberporn market, to which she subscribes, was the fastest-growing in the world in 2006, its profits soaring into billions, many of its addicted victims trailing broken relationships behind them.

Why doesn’t she have a boyfriend? After her divorce she dated with a view to finding a replacement, but she stopped on realising that she already had one – or, rather, several. She looks at men practically: can they outwit her boredom threshold, match her schedule? “People say that love can conquer all. That’s rubbish. When you’re 47 you’re sorted, you’ve got your life. I meet twentysomething girls who think they’re sexually liberated, but the bottom line is that they’re trapped in a Cinderella fantasy, desperate to meet Mr Right, and thinking that the baby is gonna make it all perfect. It’s a generation thing. I was just the same.”

She calls herself a polyamorist, and is still looking for the primary relationship around which her more casual affairs – all long-term and ongoing – would cluster. Her psychic advises that she stop dismissing men as boyfriends for their tiny flaws; she has just got rid of one because she couldn’t deal with his teeth. What did for the New York lawyer was his dingy apartment (she’s a design snob) and the fact that he served her pasta on paper plates.

What are the logistics of running a double life? Actually, despite the pseudonym, disguised photographs and the avoidance of television, her cover is so flimsy it has been blown (or given away) many times. Her pen name (also a reference to the sexually ground-breaking Philip Roth novel) is less of a disguise than it would be if she really cared about anonymity. Her PR clients are apparently unperturbed. “To be honest, it’s pretty common knowledge who I am,” she says. “A lot of my clients know. In the area I work in, people are taking drugs and doing all sorts of shit. I sleep with a few people – so what? I’m not a police woman or a teacher.” Yet she appeals to you to be careful in protecting her identity, and clearly frets about it, which must be exhausting. She describes her life as “compartmentalised”, but the danger of crossover is constant; actually, she is trapped between proving that she is not ashamed of her sex life, and wanting to protect her sons. “They’re at an age where their friends might, you know, tease them.” Tease them? She works in the media, which employs many of their schoolfriends’ parents, and if her indiscretions ever reached the playground, it would be a case of torturing them rather than teasing them.

At first she seems to be saying that she hides her exploits from them. But the family computer is her cybersex club. And haven’t they found copies of her books lying around? “Oh, sure,” she laughs (and the laugh is definitely strategic), “but they’re not interested in my writing. It’s a bit like reading your mum’s diary.” Yes, I agree, and I would have ploughed through my own mother’s secret garden in two minutes, amazed and appalled. She shrugs. “They say, ‘We don’t want to know. Just as long as we don’t come home and you’re in an embarrassing situation.’” While we are talking her older son returns; tall, polite, saying hello and dashing upstairs, aware that I am “the journalist”. Why has his mum shared her predilections with a prurient or disapproving world? Not just for the money (her advance for her first book was “a couple of thousand”, though for her second the figure shot up to £20,000). She is an attention-seeker for sure, but it’s mainly because she sees her behaviour as meaningful.

“I can be a figurehead for a new kind of female sexuality,” she says seriously. She tells her kids that people are comforted (of all reactions to her prose, that must be the most unlikely) by her work. “My readers are relieved to hear that being sexual in your forties doesn’t make you a freak.”

If her sons asked her to stop, would she? She hesitates. “I think that… that’s a difficult… I don’t know. Obviously I want to protect them, but the bottom line is that somebody has to do this, and I’m the one who’s been chosen. It’s really important to me. They know that.”

I wonder what private conversations her parents might have about their beloved daughter’s antics, and their concerns for their grandchildren. I don’t imagine Portnoy gives it a moment’s thought. There is a selfishness to her quest, maybe partly the righteous urge to liberate a generation, but essentially focused on sating a mighty libido and bolstering an ego that is not as robust as we might assume.

Portnoy is an evangelist. She recommends her lifestyle to all. If most couples’ sex lives wither for want of communication, her scene is all about instant honesty. “It’s like the first-date conversation is, ‘Okay, if you could do anything, what would you do?’” When she reads those surveys about women preferring chocolate or shoes to sex, she assumes they must be having bad sex. You can see that it works for her. I don’t suspect her of exaggerating her exploits, or of lying about how happy they make her. Here is one menopause-bound woman at least who doesn’t grimace every time she passes a mirror, who may have found the alternative to HRT and acupuncture: so much sex that her serotonin levels keep her zinging as the oestrogen plummets, so many compliments that she is enviably convinced of her gorgeousness. “I’m constantly validated, so that’s how I see myself.” Will she be too old one day? A friend in her mid-fifties has suggested stopping at 85, and Portnoy seems satisfied with that.

Recently the action has slowed. After a course on tantric sex, she was counselled by her instructor to stop chasing orgasms and re-engage with the intimacy of sex. “I’d gone so much into fantasy and role-playing and swinging that I couldn’t just be with somebody and enjoy that.”

She has a handful of regulars, a “breakfast thing”, once every six weeks. She wants to make her Portnoy persona a full-time job, with a late-night-radio agony-aunt slot, a cross between Dr Ruth and Linda Lovelace, part of her qualification for which is that she loves men. “I never think of them as bastards,” she says benignly, but then she never allows herself to be let down by them. A producer friend of hers is chasing the film rights to her books, though quite how you’d make them more than a porno flick is hard to see. Being a published author has made her a celebrity at her old haunts and garnered a fan base (and some hate mail too). She admits that she could have her pick of her fans, but actually doesn’t take the opportunity. Her female correspondents seek advice on initiation into more and better sex; 80% of her letters are from men wanting it with her. She may fear intrusion, but I think she loves the power over men, normally only accorded to the super-beautiful, the youthful, the alluringly and unavailably sexy. When a fan asked her to lunch recently, she agreed on condition that he bring a gift of her favourite lingerie in her size; reading between the lines, she felt his disappointment that, despite her careful grooming and twice-a-week personal trainer, she didn’t look more like a fantasy creature. Tough. She doesn’t dwell on the knocks.

Portnoy is bold, self-assertive, but maybe a little disingenuous about what she wants from men. It is not quite as simple as just sex, nor as complicated as true love. She wants to be treated, pampered, showered with the perks enjoyed by wives and mistresses; she wants top trips, dinners – all the tokens of romantic esteem. Of course she “dates” penniless super-studs, but those who can’t perform for their supper might be expected to buy hers. That doesn’t mean she’s grasping, but that running her own cabaret is tiring, and even the feistiest impresarios need to feel looked-after sometimes. One problem is that, when what you love best about a man is his penis, he’ll probably end up resenting you for the compliment. Especially if you’re keen on rival specimens too. I’ll never read her books again – not my thing – but I’ll always wonder if her lust will see her into a cheerfully ribald old age or leave her stranded.

For all her saucy fan mail, Portnoy wants to be a poster girl more than a mature pin-up, a walking advertisement for unleashed female sexuality. She smashes taboos like glasses at a Jewish wedding (though I can’t see one of those on the horizon) and has tapped into a publishing market churning out the evidence – a sort of frontline sexual reportage, complete with casualties – that no-strings sex is the way forward. For a single woman whose main emotional attachment is to her children, it might provide short-term answers, but how many are there with this one’s industrial appetites and nonchalance about disapproval?

What makes her tick would make many women – even bold, curious, frustrated ones – feel unanchored and confused, ultimately lonely. Recently she met a woman at a party who told Portnoy her book had changed her life: she had begun an affair. Since infidelity is the most commonly cited reason for divorce, maybe she shouldn’t be so quick to congratulate herself on liberating the drearily married.

And what of her own future? She can stave off the loneliness of the empty nest with sex, keep her contacts updated, her publishers supplied with salacious manuscripts, but it might someday become a chore. As the chill wind of mortality rushes up her geriatric miniskirt, wouldn’t she rather be at home with a nice mug of cocoa, a faithful husband, even a cosy pair of knickers?

The Not So Invisible Woman (Virgin Books, £7.99) by Suzanne Portnoy is out this week

Memoirs of sex-seeking women

Frontline sexual reportage is a bestselling genre: 300,000 copies of books like these are bought every year.

Melissa Panarello’s One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, based on her own diaries, is the tale of a teenager’s multifarious sex life. Its frankness scandalised Italy; it has sold 2m copies worldwide.

Chick-lit gets ruder in this book by a London-based sex writer who calls herself “part slut, part hopeless romantic”. She sets off on her quest for a soul mate — who must also be a sex god — with comical results.

Catherine Millet, a French art critic and editor, gained instant notoriety with this graphic memoir of gang-bangs and orgies wrapped up in philosophy. Despite its pretensions, it has sold almost 1m copies in Europe.

An opera-loving teacher of English, Juska placed this ad in the New York Review of Books: “Before I turn 67 next March, I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like”. What ensued became a bestselling memoir.

Women and sex: facts and figures

A number of surveys reveal how important sex is to the British woman, especially if she is over 40

Half of British women are not satisfied with their sex lives

59% of British wives say they would leave their marriage if they could afford to

One in nine British women regards sex as “like any other household chore”

British women are twice as likely to be unfaithful as their French counterparts

40% of women over the age of 40 admit to being unfaithful to their partner

In a survey of fortysomething women, 70% said their sex lives were better than ever before;

82% said sex was as important as it was in their twenties; 45% wanted more sex than ever before; 69% felt more adventurous in bed; 66% felt more confident about their bodies

Almost two out of three British women have logged onto a personals website

Nearly 50,000 women visited the Erotica lifestyle show in west London last year.

(TimesOnline)

There are quirkier items on the agenda than stock market sturm und drang and terrorism at the 38th annual World Economic Forum in Davos. On Saturday, one of the presentations, 'Virtual Worlds – Fiction or Reality', muses on the impact of virtual worlds on different generations, and asks how this world of immediate access, limitless social skills and unrestrained behaviour influence our moral framework.

All this fretting over artificial environment mores is a sign that virtual worlds are gradually being accepted as extensions of the real world.  The social and economic evolution of these worlds raises challenging questions about their governance; in particular, how they can be developed in a sustainable and desirable fashion as both economies and communities.

Intellectual property minefield

The latest projections indicate that participation in virtual worlds will expand significantly in the years ahead.  By some estimates, up to 80% of active internet users will inhabit a virtual world by 2012. As they have attracted users, virtual worlds have become economies in their own right.  The incorporation of a formal currency into multi-functional environments such as Second Life helped power a wave of economic growth, enabling users to buy, sell and rent digital properties such as virtual islands or space stations.

This has attracted the attention of governments:  following South Korea's lead, the United Kingdom and Australia have formulated plans to impose taxes on virtual profits.  But regulating these spaces by negotiating the multitude of large, diverse populations across various real and virtual jurisdictions is a legal Gordian knot.

The appropriation of intellectual property is illustrative.  Virtual worlds enable the sharing of digital information, which may be copyrighted, patented or trademarked in the real world.  In Second Life, cinemas exhibit Hollywood movies, bars and shops play the latest hit songs, while street traders sell ‘counterfeit’ goods such as clothing and fashion accessories.  However, the task of punishing IP infringements is complicated by the identification of users, who are veiled by their own digital avatar.

These worries may make big corporations think twice before diving into virtual worlds, despite the obvious commercial advantages of doing business without the costs and restrictions of physical trade. This pleases some; the encroachment of advertising billboards and global brands has created tensions with some users, who claim that the homogeneity of commercialisation will tarnish the mystical and unearthly quality of virtual worlds.

Communities, democratisation and moral values

The technology underpinning virtual worlds is likely to become more open and less proprietary.  Already, web-based tools such as Metaplace enable users to build micro-scale virtual worlds, which can then be used as a space to interact with friends and other users.  And so, as the technology improves, the creation of virtual worlds is likely to undergo a steady process of democratisation similar to other web-based tools, such as blogs, file sharing or social networks.

Virtual worlds also provide a space where individuals can interact, learn and work in novel ways.  For example, some of the world’s largest companies use virtual worlds to enhance collaboration between different teams, most notably in the process of research and development.  Meanwhile, academics have studied patterns of behaviour in virtual worlds to develop a range of theoretical models, including social responses to disasters or the diffusion of disease.  There is also scope to use virtual worlds as training grounds for the next generation of artificial intelligence software.

A key challenge will be creating worlds that embody a basic core of moral values.  There are concerns, for example, that the current generation of ‘digital natives’ -- the youngsters who regularly use the internet -- will be exposed to undesirable influences through their participation in virtual worlds.  Worlds such as Disney’s Club Penguin (with 3.9 million users) or WebKinz (with 7.3 million users) are relatively safe environments, but arguably infuse commercialism into every encounter.  On the other hand, worlds such as Second Life enable a relatively greater amount of creativity and freedom, but are thereby vulnerable to subversive behaviour, such as child pornography or violence.

(TheWorldNextWeek)

Steam of consciousness is not the easiest thing to read, I admit, and I apologize for this in advance. But today I had allergies act up and my nose has been running like a faucet so sleep is sort of out of the question until the combination of my body and some OTC meds clear me up. Confession: I think non-stop. Stress makes me think deeper and harder, as well. Today I read a story on the BBC online about sensory deprivation, and one former hostage said when you're alone you have to depend on you having "enough in your head" to get by, or something. I guess it's like that. The mind is the ultimate get-away. And, unlike TV, movies, or video-games, as thought-provoking and interactive as those may be, the mind has a way of urging you to churn out its contents into creative forces. Like this blog entry, for example.Virtual Worlds as the Ultimate Creative OutletThat's ultimately why virtual worlds that you can create in are so cool, because that mind-space pours out into a shared setting in a way that can be almost literal. Sure, things like music and writing and speech and other creative outlets wind up communicating that mind-space, but virtual worlds are so inherently surreal that they are like sharing dreams.

The number of people actively exploring an alternate existence in a virtual world just keeps on growing. With last weekend's release of The Burning Crusade – an expansion pack for the online role playing game World Of Warcraft – the number of current users of the game has just topped 10 million; in terms of population, that puts World Of Warcraft somewhere between Serbia and Hungary. The makers of the game also stress that these figures exclude all free promo subscriptions and dormant users.

But while we're well aware of gamers' willingness to engage in virtual combat with imaginary foes, how are other virtual worlds doing, where the aims are more philosophical, and not so dependent on your stash of ammunition?

Second Life's population recently tipped the 12 million mark, but closer inspection of their figures reveals that less than 1 million of those have logged in in the past month, while only around half of those have logged in during the last 7 days. This puts Second Life somewhere between Djibouti and Luxembourg – still not to be sniffed at, but certainly small fry in comparison to the mighty World Of Warcraft. Other worlds such as IMVU and There claim to have around a million users, but again, the active numbers are probably far smaller. Despite the servers running these games being able to log the number of users at any particular time, industry experts have admitted that it's incredibly difficult to come up with accurate statistics.

Does it matter? After all, these are just idle distractions, aren't they? Thing is, it has been proven that there's money to be made – real world money – in Second Life; if you're looking to be a virtual world entrepreneur, you want to have some idea as to whether your market is the size of Italy, or the size of the Pitcairn Islands. One thing's clear though: ramp up the chances of either being killed or being able to kill in a virtual world, and you'll get people flocking to join the party. Strange, isn't it?

(IndyBlogs)

With last week's stock market sputter and re­­newed warnings of a recession, policymakers and presidential candidates are hawking countless plans to jump-start the economy. These proposals are often complex, sometimes controversial, and almost always conjectural. If only there were a way to take them for a test drive.

Robert Bloomfield is tinkering with such a plan. As an accounting professor at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., he researches virtual worlds – a nascent, but growing, field in the social sciences.

His studies in economic policy lead him into digital realms where the laws of gravity don't apply. But what about the laws of supply and demand?

Immersive online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft attract populations that outnumber Sweden's. And now, scientists are following players down the rabbit hole in hopes of learning more about the real world.

By tapping into the behavior of an estimated 73 million online gamers, Mr. Bloomfield and others hope to study the effects of public policy with an ease and specificity that only computers can deliver. The tools are not yet perfected. But the potential is too strong to ignore, says Bloomfield.

"I got into this because I was talking to the Financial Accounting Standards Board," which develops standards for publicly traded companies in the US, he says. "They have a lot of questions about the effect of legislation, and it's very difficult for them to see before the fact what the policy effects will be."

So, inspired by the popularity of online worlds, several economists imagined creating their own immersive environments. They would design two identical worlds with the same virtual currency. And, sticking to the scientific method, the worlds would differ in some subtle variable.

Then, attract players. Let them loose. Sit back and watch.

The Standards Board loved the idea. But there was a hitch.

"What's missing? Lots and lots of money," Bloomfield says with a laugh. While games like World of Warcraft have multimillion-dollar budgets and teams of programmers, most researchers rely on grants and grad students.

For now, experiments have been repurposed to take place within the commercially successful worlds. And even though this setting is not ideal, several big reports have emerged.

Educators and epidemiologists have published studies on how players react to pandemics in World of Warcraft and the social game Whyville, which markets to young teens. IBM found that team captains in fast-paced fantasy games develop strong leadership skills – talents that the company says are applicable and highly prized in the corporate world.

Bloomfield is combing through data from a virtual stock exchange within Second Life, where avatars buy and sell shares in digital companies, earning in-game currency that is tied to real-life dollars. He's studying how unregulated markets behave. (Early analysis shows that small investors don't fare very well compared with the CEOs of the companies in which they invest – especially companies with heavy concentration of power in one person. The more distributed the control of a company, the better the returns for investors.)

Many skeptics, however, say that results found online don't mean anything in the real world. While virtual worlds are more realistic and immersive than Pong, they are still video games. Motivations and incentives are purposefully skewed to make the experience fun.

The second consideration is the test subjects themselves, says Danah Boyd, a social-technology expert and doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. One thing that attracted many researchers was the sheer size of the population. Major national polls consider 1,000 respondents to be sufficient, but Second Life offers 11.7 million avatars that can be scanned for data.

But think about the people behind the avatars, Ms. Boyd says. They are young – on average 26 to 28 years old. They are early adopters. "They are not a random sample of Americans," she says. "When I'm looking at teenagers, I don't speak about senior citizens.... And when you're talking about Second Life, you're not talking about the population at large."

Proponents of online research counter with figures that the audience for today's "massively multiplayer" games mirror the general public far more closely than most other video games. And in hopes of quelling the skeptics, several studies are attempting to see if reality shines through in the online worlds of pixels and pixies.

"If something that we know is true doesn't work in one of these virtual worlds, then we know that there's a problem," says Edward Castronova, a telecommunications professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. He's working to conclusively document principles such as supply and demand in digital worlds.

Other studies look into which human social quirks still turn up when character movement is controlled by mouse clicks.

Before graduating with a PhD from Stanford University last year, Nick Yee found that concepts of personal space from real life have seeped into Second Life.

"There is a well-known rule in the physical world that both personal distance and eye gaze are indicators of intimacy," Mr. Yee says. "So, when you're in an elevator, because you're already so close to people around you, it would be incredibly uncomfortable to look them in the eye unless you were very intimate with them. And so, in an elevator, everyone just tries to look at the blinking numbers."

Yee found the same phenomenon in Second Life. Within a distance of about 12 (virtual) meters, avatars who don't know one another generally look away.

Nothing is conclusive so far, concedes Professor Castronova. But he's certain that with time and funding, major research will emerge from virtual worlds.

"We're building petri dishes for social science," he says. "And if we're able to calibrate this machine correctly, I don't have any doubt that the results will be huge."

(ChristianScienceMonitor)

The Albion Park section of Second Life is generally a quiet place, a haven of whispering fir trees and babbling brooks set aside for those who "need to be alone to think, or want to chat privately." But shortly after 5 pm Eastern time on November 16, an avatar appeared in the 3-D-graphical skies above this online sanctuary and proceeded to unleash a mass of undiluted digital jackassery. The avatar, whom witnesses would describe as an African-American male clad head to toe in gleaming red battle armor, detonated a device that instantly filled the air with 30-foot-wide tumbling blue cubes and gaping cartoon mouths. For several minutes the freakish objects rained down, immobilizing nearby players with code that forced them to either log off or watch their avatars endlessly text-shout Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Get to the choppaaaaaaa!" tagline from Predator.

The virtual world Second Life has had a lot of bad press recently in Australia that has focused on the narcissistic and unprincipled behaviour of some of its inhabitants. Nearly six million people have joined Linden Lab’s Second Life since it went public in 2003 and there are currently 1.75 million 'active' members who have logged on in the last two months.

As a 3D virtual world, everything that exists in this virtual world — objects, buildings, clothes, land — has been created by the residents. Amid all the bad press, it is sometimes overlooked that Second Life also offers a very positive experience to people, especially with regard to understanding disabilities and offering opportunities to those with disabilities.

As a student Niels Schuddeboom travelled to Australia and was a reporter in Sydney for the 2000 Paralympic Games. Based in the university city of Utrecht in the Netherlands, he is confined to a wheelchair and was forced to drop out of his media course due to an uncompromising academic regime that was unable to work around his physical disabilities.

Known as Niles Sopor in Second Life, Niels has found an opportunity to forget his disability and experience walking life through his avatar. 'Perhaps the most profound difference I have experienced is that people have treated me differently' he said. 'In real life, due to my wheelchair and lack of physical coordination, people often regard me as intellectually as well as physically disabled.'

In the Netherlands it is unusual for people with physical disabilities to have jobs and there is a culture of protecting them from many aspects of life. Second Life has offered Niels the opportunity to break the mould. He runs his own company as a consultant on communications and new media.

Some companies are now using Second Life to experiment with alternative marketing campaigns. As well as offering commercial opportunities, Second Life has also provided Niels with the tools to express himself in artistic ways denied him in real life. He has, for example, been able to hold a camera in Second Life and take photos and make short movies.

Australian David Wallace, a quadriplegic who works as an IT coordinator at the South Australian Disability Information and Resource Centre in Adelaide has also found an outlet for his artistic side in Second Life. He recently held an exhibition of his Second Life art at the building that Illinois-based Bradley University have established on Information Island. Unlike Niels, David wanted to buy a wheelchair when he first entered Second Life and couldn’t find one! He has tried to build one in Second Life but has only had limited success.

David has found people to be very inclusive in Second Life, commenting on his blog, 'You’ve got all sorts of weird looking people in there, but everyone I’ve met seems to get along and be accepting.' British Second Lifer and cerebral palsy sufferer Simon Stevens (aka Simon Walsh in SL) has also kept his wheelchair, carrying it when he dances in Wheelies, the nightclub he operates in Second Life.

Able-bodied FEZ Rutherford has created the blog 2ndisability to record his work on developing applications for use in Second Life that replicate for the user the sensory experience of a first life physical disability. For example, he has developed applications that replicate various symptoms of different forms of blindness and cerebral palsy.

Not all visitors to his blog or people who meet him in Second Life understand that Fez is trying to comprehend how it might feel to be disabled. He has described this need to find out firsthand how others experience the world.

Predicting dating trends for the future has new resonance these days, as some of my more meddlesome – sorry, enthusiastic – friends are threatening to "fix me up". By this I mean introduce me to eligible bachelors. By eligible, since I haven't presented them with a wish list of ideal personality traits, I presume they mean alive. (Actually, I have one non-negotiable criterion. As it says in the immortal disco ditty: "You've got to have a J-O-B if you want to be with me." A fat trust fund is nice, but a sense of purpose is preferable.)

I'm wary about my friends' intentions, but I'm also retro enough to subscribe to the South Pacific school of coup de foudre – ie: some enchanted evening I may meet a stranger across a crowded room – so I suppose their rooms are as good as any.

As it has been a decade or more since I last played the field, I was pleased to discover the online magazine Tango, which devotes itself entirely to love. And there, honouring the new year's arrival, was an enlightening bit of trend forecasting peering into the future of dating in this age of technology.

Apparently that no longer means badgering the phone company to test your line in order to fathom why he didn't call. Rejection has moved on. Now he can not only not call (land and mobile), he can not text, not instant message, not pop or poke or pinch you in Facebook, and not post a video of himself reciting love poems on YouTube.

Generally I'm unshockable. Why, just this week I was consumed with interest by Pamela Stephenson Connolly's advice about vaginal atrophy. (What a marvellous phrase! I vow to employ it as often as possible in 2008.) Yet even I admit to being startled to learn just how much the world of rumpy-pumpy has progressed.

Sure, I know how sex tapes make their way into cyberspace, and know, too, that amateurs are busy getting down to business in front of home webcams. (I've never seen the appeal. Give me professionals any day. I don't want to see any mistakes.)

But I truly had no idea that there's a roaring trade in sex toys that can be controlled remotely, via computer. So while your partner's out of town at that sales convention, thanks to WiFi there's no excuse for not nipping back to his room to tickle your fancy. (Won't do much for the diminishing birth rate, but you can't have everything.)

It's also predicted that within five years, first dates will mostly occur online, via video. Initially I bristled at the notion, but it's growing on me. Cyril Connolly might have warned about the pram in the hall, but, for my money, the shared bathroom is the single most potent passion quencher on earth. Video dating means never having to say I'm sorry I had the garlic. And think what a boon it'll be for people with poor personal hygiene: they'll score like never before.

We'll also do more dating in virtual reality, both as ourselves and in avatar form, via sites such as Second Life, which is something of a double negative, since most people present a false dating self anyway – at least in the early stages when trying to seal the deal. And I haven't even begun discussing the prediction that by 2050 we'll all be bonking extremely lifelike robots before sending them off to finish the housework. The bigger question is: if we're dating up a storm in Second Life, what will happen to our first life? Babies denied the human touch fail to thrive. I haven't seen research supporting my thesis, but experience tells me that if we go too long without loving contact, something dies inside grown-ups, too.

(NewsScotsman)

Forget Second Life. The real virtual world gold rush centers on the grammar-school set. Second Life and other virtual worlds for grown-ups have enjoyed intense media attention in the last year but fallen far short of breathless expectations. The children’s versions are proving much more popular, to the dismay of some parents and child advocacy groups. Now the likes of the Walt Disney Company, which owns Club Penguin, are working at warp speed to pump out sister sites.

“Get ready for total inundation,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at the research firm eMarketer, who estimates that 20 million children will be members of a virtual world by 2011, up from 8.2 million today.

Worlds like Webkinz, where children care for stuffed animals that come to life, have become some of the Web’s fastest-growing businesses. More than six million unique visitors logged on to Webkinz in November, up 342 percent from November 2006, according to ComScore Media Metrix, a research firm.

Club Penguin, where members pay $5.95 a month to dress and groom penguin characters and play games with them, attracts seven times more traffic than Second Life. In one sign of the times, Electric Sheep, a software developer that helps companies market their brands in virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com, last week laid off 22 people, about a third of its staff.

By contrast, Disney last month introduced a “Pirates of the Caribbean” world aimed at children 10 and older, and it has worlds on the way for “Cars” and Tinker Bell, among others. Nickelodeon, already home to Neopets, is spending $100 million to develop a string of worlds. Coming soon from Warner Brothers Entertainment, part of Time Warner: a cluster of worlds based on its Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera and D. C. comics properties.

Add to the mix similar offerings from toy manufacturers like Lego and Mattel. Upstart technology companies, particularly from overseas, are also elbowing for market share. Mind Candy, a British company that last month introduced a world called Moshi Monsters, and Stardoll, a site from Sweden, sign up thousands of members in the United States each day.

“There is a massive opportunity here,” said Steve Wadsworth, president of the Walt Disney Internet Group, in an interview last week.

Behind the virtual world gravy train are fraying traditional business models. As growth engines like television syndication and movie DVD sales sputter or plateau — and the Internet disrupts entertainment distribution in general — Disney, Warner Brothers and Viacom see online games and social networking as a way to keep profits growing.

But more is at stake than cultivating new revenue streams. For nearly 50 years, since the start of Saturday morning cartoons, the television set has served as the front door to the children’s entertainment business. A child encounters Mickey Mouse on the Disney Channel or Buzz Lightyear on a DVD and before long seeks out related merchandise and yearns to visit Walt Disney World.

Now the proliferation of broadband Internet access is forcing players to rethink the ways they reach young people. “Kids are starting to go to the Internet first,” Mr. Wadsworth said.

Disney’s biggest online world is Club Penguin, which it bought in August from three Canadians in a deal worth $700 million. At the time, more than 700,000 members paid fees of $5.95 a month, delivering annual revenue of almost $50 million.

Still, one world, even a very successful one, does not alter the financial landscape at a $35.5 billion company like Disney. So Disney is pursuing a portfolio approach, investing $5 million to $10 million per world to develop a string of as many as 10 virtual properties, people familiar with Disney’s plans said.

Tinker Bell’s world, called Pixie Hollow, illustrates the company’s game plan. Disney is developing the site internally — creative executives who help design new theme park attractions are working on it — and will introduce it this summer to help build buzz for “Tinker Bell,” a big-budget feature film set for a fall 2008 release.

Visitors to a rudimentary version of Pixie Hollow, reachable through Disney.com, have already created four million fairy avatars, or online alter egos, according to Disney. The site will ultimately allow users to play games (“help create the seasons”) and interact with other “fairies.” When avatars move across the screen, they leave a sparkling trail of pixie dust, a carefully designed part of the experience.

“We wanted to come up with a way to make flying around the site feel really good,” said Paul Yanover, executive vice president and managing director of Disney Online.

Disney’s goal is to develop a network of worlds that appeal to various age groups, much like the company’s model. Preschool children might start with Pixie Hollow or Toon Town, another of Disney’s worlds, grow into Club Penguin and the one for “Cars” and graduate to “Pirates of the Caribbean” and beyond, perhaps to fantasy football at ESPN.com.

“All the stars are aligning for virtual worlds to become a mass-market form of entertainment, especially for kids and families,” Mr. Yanover said.

If virtual worlds for adults are about escaping from run-of-the-mill lives, sites for children tap into the desire to escape from the confines of reality as run by mom and dad. “I get to decide everything on Club Penguin,” said Nathaniel Wartzman, age 9, of Los Angeles, who also has a membership to a world called RuneScape.

But shopping is a powerful draw, too; most sites let children accumulate virtual points or spend their allowance money to buy digital loot. “It’s really fun to buy whatever you want inside the game,” Nathaniel said in a telephone interview. For his penguin, “like for Christmas I bought a fireplace, a flat-screen TV and a Christmas tree,” he said.

Online worlds, which typically have low overhead and fat profit margins once they are up and running, charge a monthly fee of $5 to $15 and require the adoption of an avatar. Some sites are free and rely on advertising to make money; others are advertising and subscription hybrids. Webkinz relies on the sale of stuffed animals, which come with tags that unlock digital content.

The power of the virtual worlds business was shown recently when Vivendi announced a plan to buy Activision, a publisher of video games for consoles like the Sony PlayStation 3. Vivendi owns World of Warcraft, a virtual world for adults with more than nine million members and revenue of more than $1 billion.

Still, the long-term appetite for the youth-oriented sites is unclear. Fads have always whipsawed the children’s toy market, and Web sites are no different, analysts warn. Parents could tire of paying the fees, while intense competition threatens to undercut the novelty. There are now at least 10 virtual worlds that involve caring for virtual pets.

Privacy and safety are a growing concern, particularly as companies aim at younger children. Some virtual worlds are now meant to appeal to preschoolers, using pictures to control actions so that reading is not required.

And critics are sharpening their knives. “We cannot allow the media and marketing industries to construct a childhood that is all screens, all the time,” said Susan Linn, a Boston psychologist and the director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a nonprofit group that has complained of ads for movies on Webkinz.com.

Operators shrug off worries about fads and competition. “Are features like creating an avatar a long-term advantage for anyone? Probably not,” Mr. Yanover said. “The viability and sustainability of this business comes from the shifting behavior of kids and how they spend their leisure time.”

As for privacy and safety, companies point to a grid of controls. For instance, Neopets restricts children under 13 from certain areas unless their parents give permission in a fax. Several Neopets employees patrol the site around the clock, and messaging features are limited to approved words and phrases.

“Parents know they can trust our brand to protect kids,” said Steve Youngwood, executive vice president for digital media at Nickelodeon. “We see that as a competitive advantage.”

(New York Times)

Being a sex writer comes with its perks. While other people are off working nine-to-five jobs and contributing to society, I’m here by my computer, propositioning fellow internet-goers for “research.” Text chat, webcams, virtual worlds, fetishists, first-timers: not only is it fun, it also makes for some seriously colorful stories. That’s why I’ve chosen to look back at the year 2007 the best way I know how: with a list of highlights from my own online sexual encounters. Names have been omitted to protect the innocent, the awkward, and the superlatively bad in cyber bed.

Sexiest encounter with a transgender GI. I admit it: I think writing is hot. Good grammar and vocabulary turn me on. Add some BDSM to a well-crafted sex chat and voilà! Happy New Year to me! Unfortunately, it’s gotten hard to find cybersex partners who compose full sentences—let alone sultry prose. So imagine my delight earlier this year when I found myself on a cyber sofa in the private Second Life home of an eloquent dominatrix. Dressed in a pair of ripped fatigues, she’d brought her submissive along for us to play with—a pretty girl, bound and gagged. My dominatrix spoke enough for two. In between florid descriptions of in-game sex acts, she explained she was a transitioning transgender (male-to-female) in real life, and that she’d recently left the army. I don’t know what impressed me more: her personal story, or her way with words. Who else could have made “cunt” sound elegant while wearing camouflage?

Most discouraging half an hour for the future of cybersex. If you’re looking for a quick online fuck—say to round-out a collection of cybersex transcripts you’re analyzing for linguistics, perhaps—the easiest places to get laid are the AOL chatrooms. Unfortunately, they’re also the most depressing. In a less than 30 minute session I was messaged by more than ten guys; they all used the exact same lines: “Age/sex/location?”; “What do you do for fun?”; “Do you want to suck my cock?” By the end, I had a list of ten stock responses to copy and paste. The most depressing part: no one seemed to notice.

Most educational use of a topless beach. This spring, I was cruising a nude beach in Second Life when I came across a naked avatar standing by himself in the sand. Like many Second Life users, he turned out to speak only French. Lucky for me, our shirt-less flirtations turned into a practice session for my upcoming move to France. Had I been blinded by his well-rendered pecs, or could I really all of a sudden conjugate verbs faster than you could say “animated cyber genitals”?

Most awkward post-coital question about shoes. Just the other day I was instant messaged by a male Click Me fan. While I love hearing from readers, I find that many share the problem of spitting out the question they really want to ask: “Would you like to cyber?” After this reader stepped up to the plate though, I started to wonder if I could possibly be the first woman he’d ever talked to. Thirty seconds after coming, he asked, “Why do women have so many shoes?” Then, “Girls have all these emotions, huh?” Yes, and one of those emotions is “weirded out.”

Hottest in-office story time involving naughty dice. The next best thing to having sex? Hearing about it, in detail. One day this fall I arrived at work to find an email in my inbox from an online partner. With lusty precision, the note recounted the tale of a cyber threesome conducted across the globe. In America, the man in question had rolled a set of naughty dice, while two of his friends in Japan acted out the dice’s instructions (“kiss him,” “lick her,” “fuck him”) in front of their webcam. He watched, masturbated, and documented his orgasm with photos. “Just writing that story got me so hard,” he admitted at the end of his email. Understandably: reading it steamed up the inside of my cubicle for the rest of the week.

Most embarrassing description of a personal body part. Sometimes even the most well-intended compliment can go horribly awry. This summer I bought a Mac, and with it came a built-in camera. For a writer who spends her days getting in people’s virtual pants, such a webcam has only one foreseeable use: nudity. Nervous, I showed my first batch of sexy photos to an online friend. At first he seemed genuinely impressed. But when he started praising my body parts individually, things turned weird. “I really like your breasts,” he said, “they look so light and fluffy.” Light and fluffy? Those are adjectives I use to describe scrambled eggs, not breasts. "Thanks,” I typed back. What else could I say? Ever since, breakfast hasn’t been quite the same.

Most exhibitionistic comment thread on a public blog. A few months back, I blogged about fetishes in cybersex. That got two of my regular commenters talking, and eventually downright near cybering, in the comments of my post. Noticing that they weren’t alone, they finally picked a more private time and place, and they’ve been cyber lovers ever since. On Thanksgiving I got an email from them saying they were “thankful” for “hot and sexy time together, with more to ‘cum’.”

Here’s to all the sexy, colorful moments ahead in 2008!

(Villagevoice)

Like many retailers, Chapeau Tres Mignon started preparing for the Christmas shopping frenzy in mid-November. There is just one tiny difference. The accessories shop - renowned for its owner's signature hats - is located in Dreamworld East 183, 194, 21 on the information super highway, rather than on any real life High Street. But just because the framework of the store and everything inside it is built with bits and bytes rather than bricks and mortar, does not make what is on sale any less desirable.

About $1.5m is currently spent every 24 hours in the virtual world Second Life - a three dimensional multi-user platform that is less a game than a space where people can interact with each other through online representations of themselves called avatars.

The environment and everything in it from clothes and castles to skins and walks has been built using various design and scripting programmes by the people that have signed up to the world.

Megg Andrews is one content creator who through her avatar Megg Demina has developed a reputation for designing outrageous hats, which she sells in malls all around the virtual world including from her flagship shop Chapeau Tres Mignon.

She says sales in the week her winter collection launched this month matched those for the entire year as Second Life festive fun seekers and bargain-hunters flocked to her shop.

This is largely thanks to a range of stylish ice skates she designed for adroit avatars wishing to figure eight around the ice rink she paid to have built in front of her shop.

"There is a big market for everything Christmas related," enthuses Megg, who is a real life stylist and part-time lecturer at the London College of Fashion.

"Second Life residents get really into it."

Holly or folly?

Take a tour through Second Life, and it seems that there are Christmas trees of varying description everywhere, from inside a pub on the corner of a frighteningly detailed snowy replica of Dublin to a sunny promenade of a virtual Puerto Banus.

In addition, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of winter-wonderland themed events specifically put on for the holiday, with a number of locations offering sleigh rides, ice skating and the chance to take part in carolling.

Some of these are being offered by big real life brands eager to get involved with this emerging consumer base.

Last year, the US television network NBC Universal made its Second Life debut by holding a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in a simulation of New York's famous Rockefeller Centre at the exact moment that the real event - an annual tradition - was being televised live.

According to Jeska Dzwigalski, the community manager at Second life creator Linden Lab, there were at last count 11 million registered players, or residents of the world, though not all will be logged on at any one time.

"Second Life is all about community and building relationships and social networks, so it's not a surprise that holidays, such as Christmas, which is all about togetherness, is a big deal," she says.

"One thing that trips up people who are sceptical of virtual worlds is that they see virtual content as not real, just pixels on a screen," Ms Dzwigalski explains.

The key to making money is to understand that the digital products still have a value, in much the same way that Apple sells digital music through its iTunes store.

She adds: "One day, having a virtual representation of yourself will be as common as having an email address."

Economic expansion

You may still think those indulging in cyber festivities are one chestnut short of a stuffed turkey dinner, but there are real people merrily cashing in on the Christmas spirit.

For example, of the thousands of Christmas trees proliferating the world, the chances are that a large proportion were bought from the chap whose avatar is Kris Lemon, a virtual-world tree retailer of some renown.

One festive tree he is selling is priced at 609 linden dollars, the Second life virtual currency that can be exchanged for real US dollars on the LindeX.

The exchange rate has been fairly stable for a while with between 255 to 265 linden dollars buying a real, folding US dollar bill.

This means Mr Lemon will make about $2.30 (£1.65) for each of the Christmas trees he sells.

And while that may not seem like a huge amount, the sheer volume of his business, his ability to duplicate his own design and sell it as a separate item, and the fact that his overheads are minimal, means that Mr Lemon is set to make a tidy sum from yuletide fever.

He is not the only one.

Formal-wear clothes specialist Simone expects sales to double in the Christmas period, pushing the total for the year to $200,000, as the number of festive cocktail parties drives up the demand for ball gowns and tuxedos.

Simone's real life creator Veronica Brown is so positive about the future of the brand that she plans to expand early next year, opening a sister shop selling more casual couture - a marked contrast from the profit warnings and sombre trading updates from real life High Street retailers on both sides of the Atlantic.

"The difference is one of my mock Chanel creations will cost $1, considerably less than the real thing," says Ms Brown, who lives in Indianapolis, the heart of the US Mid-West, which has been badly affected by a US-wide housing downturn.

"The entertainment industry tends to do well during recessions," she says.

Virtual gifts

Seasonal goodwill extends to the exchange of presents, which are again computer-generated material for your avatar to show off and enjoy.

Linden Lab, which is based in San Francisco, said there were 16 million transactions between residents last month, with about four million worth 1 linden dollar, and 3,000 for between 100,000 and 499,999 lindens.

Unlike in real life, where most people are constrained by price limitations and the boundaries of reality, gifts in Second Life can range from a car or a house to an outrageous hairdo or different colour eyes.

Another virtual clothes designer is based in the Philippines and has an avatar called Shai Delacroix.

She plans to spend between 20,000 and 100,000 lindens on virtual gifts for her US boyfriend, whose avatar is the Christmas tree seller Kris Lemon, and whom she has never actually met in real life.

Return policy

But in the rapidly emerging virtual economy, law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse warns gift buyers and receivers that the laws governing their consumer rights are still unestablished, with most vendors operating a no-returns policy.

Piracy is also rife, making shopping a somewhat risky affair for the uninitiated.

"The level of protection consumers enjoy in virtual worlds is far from clear cut," says partner David Naylor, who as a Second Life resident advises on legal issues when they arise.

"Try and be as certain as possible that you are buying from a reputable brand and be a little cautious about spending too much money because if unwelcome the recipient may find it difficult to return."

The most positive aspect of a virtual gift could be its green and ethical credentials with no wrapping paper clogging up landfill sites and no risk of it having been cobbled together in a Chinese sweat shop.

As Megg Andrews puts it: "It is a gesture of love without the negative aspects of capitalist consumerism."

After suffering a devastating stroke four years ago, Susan Brown was left in a wheelchair with little hope of walking again. Today, the 57-year-old Richmond, Va., woman has regained use of her legs and has begun to reclaim her life, thanks in part to encouragement she says she gets from an online "virtual world" where she can walk, run and even dance. Roberto Salvatierra, long imprisoned in his home by his terror over going outdoors, has started venturing outside more after gaining confidence by first tentatively exploring the three-dimensional, interactive world on the Internet.

John Dawley III, who has a form of autism that makes it hard to read social cues, learned how to talk with people more easily by using his computer-generated alter ego to practice with other cyber-personas.

Brown, Salvatierra and Dawley are just a few examples of an increasing number of sick, disabled and troubled people who say virtual worlds are helping them fight their diseases, live with their disabilities and sometimes even begin to recover. Researchers say they are only starting to appreciate the impact of this phenomenon.

"We're at a major technical and social transition with this technology. It has very recently started to become a very big deal, and we haven't by any means digested what the implications are," said William Sims Bainbridge, a social scientist at the National Science Foundation.

In addition to helping individual patients, virtual worlds are being used for a host of other health-related purposes. Medical schools are using them to train doctors. Health departments are using them to test first responders. Researchers are using them to gain insights into how epidemics spread. Health support groups are using them to educate the public and raise money.

These increasingly sophisticated online worlds enable people to create rich virtual lives through "avatars" – identities they can tailor to their desires: Old people become young. Infirm people become vibrant. Paralyzed people become agile.

They walk, run, and even fly and "teleport" around vast realms offering shopping malls, bars, homes, parks and myriad other settings with trees swaying in the wind, fog rolling in and an occasional deer prancing past. They schmooze, flirt and comfort one another using lifelike shrugs, slouches, nods and other gestures while they type instant messages or talk directly through headsets.

Because the full-color, multifaceted nature of the experience offers so much more "emotional bandwidth" than traditional Web sites, e-mail lists and discussion groups, users say the experience can feel astonishingly real. Participants develop close relationships and share intimate details even while, paradoxically, remaining anonymous. Some say they open up in ways they never would in face-to-face encounters in real support groups, therapy sessions, or even with family and close friends in their true lives.

"You're in this imaginary world. People don't know much about who you really are. In that anonymity, in that almost dreamlike state, people express things about themselves they may not otherwise," said John Suler, who studies the psychology of the Internet at Rider University in New Jersey, noting the experience can be especially useful for people with disabilities and those in remote areas where support groups or therapists are far away.

While the emergence of these worlds has generated controversy over the gender-bending, sexually outrageous, profiteering and even violent virtual behavior of some participants, their usefulness for meeting health needs has just begun to draw attention.

"There is a fundamental irony here," said Thomas Murray of the Hastings Center, a medical ethics think tank in Garrison, N.Y. "Avatars tend to be young, beautiful, and never age or get sick. But at the same time they can serve as an important way to share information about health."

Murray and others, however, worry that participants may neglect potentially more helpful real-life relationships, or have unrealistic expectations about what virtual worlds can do. Users and health-care providers may be rushing ahead, they say, without validating the usefulness of these worlds or identifying the dangers.

"We've seen the power of the Internet and what it can do," said Albert "Skip" Rizzo, a University of Southern California psychologist who treats traumatized Iraq war veterans with virtual reality. "But as we all know there can also be negative consequences. We really need to step back and think, 'What are the practical and ethical things we can do in the area of health, and what can't we do?'"

The emotional punch of virtual worlds makes them fertile breeding grounds for false, misleading and possibly dangerous information. Sick, lonely and psychologically fragile people are particularly vulnerable.